Blogging About Bitly

That's right, this post is about Bitly Enterprise, a company that advises about half of the Fortune 500 and over 75% of the world's largest media companies on how to get the most out of social media. Luckily for the resource environment there is the bitly Blog that sometimes does these great data posts.  The latest points to  breakdown of traffic from social networks by country  where nifty interactive world map illustrates how the proportion of a country's traffic from the social network you select (out of 16 so far, including Weibo, vk, etc.) compares to the proportion for the world as a whole. On a lighter note, last month prior to the Oscars, the bitly science team decided to mine their data for best picture and nominee popularity in social media.  There is also the Bitly Enterprise Blog that is more focused on social media news, including a Bitly Brief each week of important stories around the web. Mind you, these blogs are mainly for marketers, but they know and we know that includes the broader rubric, "content sellers," which pretty much speaks to us all.

New at Penn: WARC

Penn Libraries has recently added WARC to its rich collection of business intelligence resources. WARC is an international marketing database that includes over 6,000 marketing case studies as well as trend analysis, research reports, and other business intelligence information,  For media industry researchers it is chock full of useful and timely reports and data.

WARC stands for World Advertising Research Center. It has been around since 1985 and is also the publisher of International Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research and International Journal of Market Research (available from the Penn Libraries e-resources). If you do literature searches on media effects, persuasion, or communication campaigns it is not unusual to pull up articles in the advertising and marketing realm in journals such as these. Let's just say these folks care about persuasion like nobody's business (pun intended).

WARC's Data section contains advertising expenditure data from 80 global markets, a comparison of global media costs (compare costs by market, medium, target audience and time period), Adspend forecasts for 12 key countries, and a wide range of media usage statistic, including TV viewing data from over 70 countries and time spent by media comparisons (television, radio, internet, newspapers, magazines and cinema) in 10 non-US markets.

WARC's Topic section is useful for sifting out soft drink and automotive reports from reports in Media and Entertainment, or Telecoms, to mention the categories of most interest to communication researchers. 

The Industry Trends section has a Media/Tech category where you can find such articles as Cloud Gaming: What the End of the Console Means for Gamers, Brands and the Global Gaming Industry (August 2012). 

Demographic Data Books

I've just updated our New Strategist publications. We now have the latest editions of:

The Millenials: Americans Born 1977 to 1974
Generation X: Americans Born 1965 to 1976
The Baby Boom: American Born 1946 to 1964
Older Americans: A Changing Market
Household Spending: Who Spends How Much on What
Who's Buying: Entertainment
Who's Buying: Information Products and Services

These books include demographic data on media consumption as well as larger context profiles (eduction, health, housing, income, etc.) of groups broken down by age, race, and gender. The data is rounded up from various sources (always cited) such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of the Census, Pew Research Center, National Endowment for the Arts, Federal Reserve Board, National Center for Health Statistics, and others.

In addition to these old standards, three additional volumes devoted to Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans provide even deeper data. They are:

Who We Are: Asians
Who We Are: Blacks
Who We Are: Hispanics

These titles are all available in ASC Library Reference.

2007 Entertainment, Media & Advertising Market Research Handbook

Now in its 9th edition, The 2007 Entertainment, Media & Advertising Market Research Handbook combines current market statistics with trend analysis and marketing strategies, providing a comprehensive and reliable guide for strategic planning and market development across all media platforms. Published by the market research firm Richard K. Miller & Associates, this 230+ page handbook offers the latest data on the major advertising and media corporations, consumer uses of media (including multitasking), advertising by medium, political ad spending, cable and satellite services, consumer magazines, the internet, mobile media, newspapers (including online, college and free metro dailies), radio (including satellite and internet), and television (including online, mobile, and digital), filmed entertainment (in theaters and video sales and rentals), live performances and events, recorded music, and video games. There is an extensive section on marketing which includes branding, entertainment, and virtual worlds. Specific ethnic markets focused on are: African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American; also the Gays and Lesbian market, and markets divided into age groups (Millenials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers) and gender. There is also a section on faith-based media.

The handbook is available in the ASC Library as a print out. The ASC community can request the pdf version from me.